Memorizing poetry is the bugbear of students everywhere. Or, at least that is how I remember things. I felt hatred mixed with ironic bemusement at being forced to memorize Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy in my senior English class, and I was not alone. As with many similar tasks, I stuffed the text down on a Tuesday night and regurgitated it Wednesday afternoon for the test, never having properly digested it at all. So things went.
I have no doubt that high school and college students across the nation have similar stories about the tribulations of rote memorization. So, it may come as a surprise to many to learn that our teachers were not just sadists, as we had long supposed. In the teacher’s notes to her Poems, Poets, Poetry, esteemed critic Helen Vendler explains the value of memorization: Continue reading “Memorization and its Discontents”
Last night, June 30th, a poetry event curated by esteemed avant-garde poet Eileen Myles took place on the rooftop of the Hispanic Museum in Manhattan. The performance was part of Tuesdays on the Terrace, and was vaguely (as Myles said in her invitation) in response to “Zoe’s show and the Hispanic Museum’s collection.”
Avant-garde poet Eileen Myles, curator
The event was highly unusual as far as poetry events go. For one thing, it was performed SILENTLY.
The invitation says, “All will converge to sit, move, read, and perform silently for one hour on the Hispanic Museum’s incredibly spacious and evocative Audubon Plaza. You as audience are invited to come up and stroll amongst this silent happening at your own genial pace. You are urged to dress vividly and shamelessly as if you were attending a wedding or a renaissance fair or a nature hike, an art opening, poetry reading, or to spray-paint things on your roof.”
After the performance, the “silent texts” were available in a bilingual, printed edition for all to read. And then performers and audience had a party.
More from the press release: “The Collection of Silence, a baroque site-specific work around the possibilities of silence as central to the syntax and punctuation of everyday life. A diverse group of poets will present short pieces at various locations on the outdoor plaza of Audubon Terrace, where they will be joined by a group of students from PS4.
“Also accompanied by dancers, Buddhists, an opera singer, and a life drawing class, this mute and active gathering will demonstrate and celebrate the collective power of silence and the capacity of an unvoiced poem to serve the communal purposes of public life.”
Questions for Teaching:
1. What do you think the purpose would be to having a silent poetry event?
2. What does this event try to say about the role of audience in more conventional poetry readings? What’s the purpose of asking the audience to dress up or to dress outrageously?
3. What relationship might poetry have to art in this context? How are the mediums similar? Different?
4. It might be interesting to contrast Myles’s event with a poetry slam or a lecture on poetry. How are the events different? What qualities do they share? Ask students to reflect on their preferences and consider where those preferences come from.
5. Stage your own poetry event. As a class, discuss what qualities it will have and why.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.
In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Art Scheck makes a good argument for using poetry to teach fundamental reading (and thinking) skills. He laments the difficulty students have reading poetry, and offers insight to teachers who haven’t considered teaching poetic language:
“So what?” you may think. “I don’t teach poetry.” But maybe difficulty with figurative language is just one facet of trouble with analogies: As A is to B, so C is to . . . ? Problems with metaphors and analogies might explain why many students cannot carry concepts from one problem to another, or, for that matter, even learn the concepts in the first place.
Mr. Scheck bravely goes where other composition teachers fear to tread, patiently leading his students through a Shakespearean sonnet until the light of comprehension dawns.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.
Take a poem that you don’t know very well. One of Robert Lowell’s sonnets from The Dolphin will do nicely. Type it out with several lines of blank space between each line of poetry. In the blank spaces, write another line to fit into the poem. Don’t worry if the grammar isn’t quite right. When you’re done, remove the lines from the Lowell poem so all you’re left with are your own lines. Then edit them to make sense. Voila, a new poem.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Siân Killingsworth is a freelance writer, teacher, and poet. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, daughter, and two ancient pugs.
When your students are living in the real world, with oral exams and essays and GRE prep—not to mention dates, soccer practice, rush, the classes they “care about,” and their crummy part-time jobs—it’s easy for them to fall into the trap of thinking of poetry as frivolous. Or as unapproachable solipsism. Or both. Largely irrelevant, in any case.
It doesn’t help that poetry is already a traditionally marginalized artistic medium. Take the floor plan of your local Barnes & Nobel. If space assignation is accepted as indicative of general cultural importance—and I think, on some level, it has to be—the “poetry alcove” squarely places the form as sequestered curio, hidden from all except those expressly searching for it. And even then!
The general feeling, famously articulated by the poet Eamon Grennan, that more people write than read poetry doesn’t help matters. The precepts of supply and demand are latent in the American subconscious; when there’s too much of a good thing it turns bad, and we’d frankly rather not waste our time.
This depressing little idea is the seed of “The End of Verse?”, a 2009 Newsweek article based on recent findings by the National Endowment for the Arts:
FSG: You teach Creative Writing at Pratt and Columbia. I did my time in an MFA program, where I taught a few undergraduate courses in poetry. In my experience it seems fairly easy to get students excited about sharing their own work, but not so easy to get them excited about critiquing their colleagues and published works of poetry. Do you have this problem when you teach?
CT: I teach mostly undergrads with whom, I’m grateful to say, I don’t have that problem. Though I will say I’m a big believer in the notion that, for a poet, anything one does is done to enrich or broaden one’s own poems, so when I teach published poetry to my students, and even when I’m leading a workshop, I’m always urging my students to pretend they had written whatever is on the table, to try to read it as if they were spontaneously thinking the work under consideration at that moment.
What do you think about temporarily claiming ownership of a poem under analysis? I can certainly see how it’d be an interesting thought experiment…a sort of literary method acting to help students get into the poem. I’m also hesitant, though; the poet in me feels like it may be an overly aggressive pedagogical tactic.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………. Nick Richardson is an associate editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s. He holds an MA in Literary and Cultural Theory from Boston College and has published three books (two poetry, one prose)…exhibiting what poet Andrei Codrescu has called “a fresh sort of daring in the overstrained broth of contemporary American poetry.” He is also the publisher of A Mutual Respect Books and Music, an underground chapbook press operating out of Brooklyn, NY.
I recently contacted forty or so English adjunct friends—all composition and rhetoric instructors—for tips on teaching poetry. About half responded that, while they do teach a poem or two in their classes, they were too uncertain about their methods to share any pedagogical tricks or assignments in a public sphere. The rest were quiet as chrysanthemums.
In an effort to break the ice, what follows is my own experience teaching poetry in a first-year composition class.
It was my first semester teaching, and my students had just finished the second drafts of their final research papers. About half were desert dry; the rest: talk-radio screeds. The peer-review hadn’t gone very well, either. The problem: I’d assumed that everyone knew what a good research paper looked like, but it was clear from the drafts that I’d highlighted the one-two punch importance of good research and a strong thesis…and glossed over form. I cleared our schedule for the next class once I realized what was going on, canceling all readings and asking everyone to please take a break from their papers.
Ram Devineni is the founder and editor of Rattapallaxmagazine, a literary journal dedicated to publishing poetry from around the world. Devineni, also a filmmaker, co-founded the film school Academia Internacional de Cinema in São Paulo and recently co-produced Amir Naderi’s Vegas: Based on a True Story, which premiered at the 2008 Venice Film Festival and showed in competition in the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. For the 2009 PEN World Voices Literary Festival, Devineni curated a panel on literary short films and documentaries.
The Teaching Poetry blog asked Ram a few questions about his work with poetry and film.
Teaching Poetry: Tell us about your documentary on Ginsberg.
Ram Devineni: Ginsberg’s Karma is a thirty-minute documentary about the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. It follows his mythical journey to India in the early 1960s that transformed his perspective on life and his work. Poet Bob Holman, director of the Bowery Poetry Club in New York, traces the two years Ginsberg spent in India by visiting the places where he stayed and talking with the people he met and influenced, as well as intimate interviews with Beat poets and friends. Bob and I make appearances in it, too. Continue reading “Interview with Rattapallax Editor and Filmmaker, Ram Devineni”
While I love poetry, there are only a few poems from which I can casually quote: “This Be The Verse” by Philip Larkin, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot, and “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These were the three poems I was forced to recite as a student of the New Orleans Public School System (although, to be fair, “This Be The Verse” wasn’t actually assigned—it was recited as an act of defiance).
“Kubla Khan” was the first, a long poem I chose for the line: “A savage place! as holy and enchanted / As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing for her demon-lover!” This particular recitation remains memorable for the way my eighth-grade teacher, Blake Bailey—the now celebrated Yates and Cheever biographer—attempted (and failed) to bite back laughter at my shifts between stumbling forgetfulness and high drama: “by…like…woman wailing !”
Recitation need not be tortuous (in fact, it can be lucrative). The mere act of reading poems aloud, or hearing them read, can be galvanizing, and can help push an assignment from a collection of words on a page to a transformative emotional experience. Take, for example, the following recording of W. B. Yeats reading “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”:
For discussion:
1. I chose to share this version of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” because it includes Yeats’s own commentary on writing and recitation: “It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into the verse the poems I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.” Does Yeats’s reading seem strange to you (as he thinks it will)? And is this hyper-poetic enunciation effective?
2. Take a moment to read the “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and then listen to Yeats’s reading again. Does his articulation enhance your understanding of the poem?
3. How would you read “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” aloud to best impart your particular interpretation of the poem?
More free video and audio resources can be found here:
……………………………………………………………………………………………………. Nick Richardson is an associate editor at Bedford/St. Martin’s. He holds an MA in Literary and Cultural Theory from Boston College and has published three books (two poetry, one prose)…exhibiting what poet Andrei Codrescu has called “a fresh sort of daring in the overstrained broth of contemporary American poetry.” He is also the publisher of A Mutual Respect Books and Music, an underground chapbook press operating out of Brooklyn, NY.
In this week’s edition of New York Magazine, actor James Franco (Milk, Spider Man) shows that he knows a thing or two about poetry. Even more interesting is that as a student he made films inspired by the poetry of Anthony Hecht and Frank Bidart.
New York Magazine writes, “At a Gucci-hosted cocktail party for an art film called Erased James Franco, Franco said he discovered Bidart while studying poetry at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. ‘This teacher brought it into class, and everybody was kinda shocked. It’s very dark and it’s about this guy. He’s a murderer, a necrophiliac, and it’s in a poem, right?’ said Franco. ‘What struck me is that it’s a kind of a confessional poem, or a dramatic monologue. It’s as if the poet is using this crazy man as a mask to express certain feelings and go to an extreme place where those feelings could be felt.’ ”
Franco, who has literary aspirations, will star as Allen Ginsberg in the soon-to-be-released movie, Howl, named after Ginsberg’s break-out poem.
Still the question remains, can a film inspired by a poem effectively serve that poem? After all, the visuals in the readers’ mind are very personal. Can a film do justice to that experience? Here’s a YouTube movie of Langston Hughes’s “Weary Blues.” Decide for yourself by watching the movie below, and answering the questions that follow. Continue reading “Can Film Serve Poetry?”
